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Sinclair Lewis - Biographical

To recount my life for the Nobel
Foundation, I would like to present it as possessing some
romantic quality, some unique character, like Kipling's early adventures in India, or
Bernard Shaw's leadership in the
criticism of British arts and economics. But my life, aside from
such youthful pranks as sailing on cattleships from America to
England during university vacations, trying to find work in
Panama during the building of the Canal, and serving for two
months as janitor of Upton Sinclair's abortive co-operative
colony, Helicon Hall, has been a rather humdrum chronicle of much
reading, constant writing, undistinguished travel à la
tripper, and several years of comfortable servitude as an
editor.

I was born in a prairie village in that most Scandinavian part of
America, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor, in 1885. Until I
went East to Yale
University I attended the ordinary public school, along with
many Madsens, Olesons, Nelsons, Hedins, Larsons. Doubtless it was
because of this that I made the hero of my second book, The
Trail of the Hawk, a Norwegian, and Gustaf Sondelius, of
Arrowsmith, a Swede - and to me, Dr. Sondelius is the
favorite among all my characters.

Of Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk, I wrote -back in
1914, when I was working all day as editor for the George H.
Doran Publishing Company, and all evening trying to write novels
- as follows:

«His carpenter father had come from Norway, by way of
steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name (to
Americanize it) from Ericsen... Carl was second-generation
Norwegian; American-born, American in speech, American in
appearance, save for his flaxen hair and china-blue eyes... When
he was born the ‹typical Americans› of earlier stocks
had moved to city palaces or were marooned on run-down farms. It
was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a
Grant, who was the ‹typical American› of his period.
It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the
Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and
the exuberant October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone;
then to add, in his own or another generation, new American
aspirations for beauty.»

My university days at Yale were undistinguished save for
contributions to the Yale Literary Magazine. It may be
interesting to say that these contributions were most of them
reeking with a banal romanticism; that an author who was later to
try to present ordinary pavements trod by real boots should
through university days have written nearly always of Guinevere
and Lancelot - of weary bitterns among sad Irish reeds - of
story-book castles with troubadours vastly indulging in wine, a
commodity of which the author was singularly ignorant. What the
moral is, I do not know. Whether imaginary castles at nineteen
lead always to the sidewalks of Main Street at thirty-five, and
whether the process might be reversed, and whether either of them
is desirable, I leave to psychologists.

I drifted for two years after college as a journalist, as a
newspaper reporter in Iowa and in San Francisco, as - incredibly
- a junior editor on a magazine for teachers of the deaf, in
Washington, D.C. The magazine was supported by Alexander Graham
Bell, inventor of the telephone. What I did not know about
teaching the deaf would have included the entire subject, but
that did not vastly matter, as my position was so insignificant
that it included typing hundreds of letters every week begging
for funds for the magazine and, on days when the Negro janitress
did not appear, sweeping out the office.

Doubtless this shows the advantages of a university education,
and it was further shown when at the age of twenty-five I managed
to get a position in a New York publishing house at all of
fifteen dollars a week. This was my authentic value on the labor
market, and I have always uncomfortably suspected that it would
never have been much higher had I not, accidentally, possessed
the gift of writing books which so acutely annoyed American
smugness that some thousands of my fellow citizens felt they must
read these scandalous documents, whether they liked them or
not.

From that New York position till the time five years later when I
was selling enough short stories to the magazines to be able to
live by free-lancing, I had a series of typical white-collar,
unromantic, office literary jobs with two publishing houses, a
magazine (Adventure), and a newspaper syndicate, reading
manuscripts, writing book advertising, writing catalogues,
writing uninspired book reviews - all the carpentry and plumbing
of the city of letters. Nor did my first five novels rouse the
slightest whispers: Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the
Hawk, The Job, The Innocents, and Free
Air they were called, published between 1914 and 1919, and
all of them dead before the ink was dry. I lacked sense enough to
see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue
writing.

Main Street, published late in 1920, was my first novel to
rouse the embattled peasantry and, as I have already hinted, it
had really a success of scandal. One of the most treasured
American myths had been that all American villages were
peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that
myth. Scandalous. Some hundreds of thousands read the book with
the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching
tooth.

Since Main Street, the novels have been Babbitt
(1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Mantrap (1926); Elmer
Gantry (1927); The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928); and
Dodsworth (1929). The next novel, yet unnamed, will
concern idealism in America through three generations, from 1818
till 1930-an idealism which the outlanders who call Americans
«dollar-chasers» do not understand. It will presumably
be published in the autumn of 1932, and the author's chief
difficulty in composing it is that, after having received the
Nobel Prize, he longs to write better than he can.

I was married, in England, in 1928, to Dorothy Thompson, an
American who had been the Central European correspondent and
chef de bureau of the New York Evening Post. My first
marriage, to Grace Hegger, in New York, in 1914, had been
dissolved.

During these years of novelwriting since 1915, I have lived a
quite unromantic and unstirring life. I have travelled much; on
the surface it would seem that one who during these fifteen years
had been in forty states of the United States, in Canada, Mexico,
England, Scotland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, the West
Indies, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Poland, and Russia must have
been adventurous. That, however, would be a typical error of
biography. The fact is that my foreign travelling has been a
quite uninspired recreation, a flight from reality. My real
travelling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a
Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City
or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to
me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world - the
Average Citizens of the United States, with their friendliness to
strangers and their rough teasing, their passion for material
advancement and their shy idealism, their interest in all the
world and their boastful provincialism - the intricate
complexities which an American novelist is privileged to
portray.

And nowadays, at forty-six, with my first authentic home - a farm
in the pastoral state of Vermont - and a baby born in June 1930,
I am settled down to what I hope to be the beginning of a
novelist's career. I hope the awkward apprenticeship with all its
errors is nearly done.

Biographical note on Sinclair
Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) continued to be
a prolific writer, but none of his later writings equalled the
success or stature of his chiefworks of the twenties. After his
divorce from his second wife in 1942, Sinclair Lewis lived
chiefly in Europe. His later novels include Ann Vickers
(I933), It Can't Happen Here (1935), The Prodigal
Parents (1938), Gideon Planish (1943), Cass
Timberlane (1945), Kingsblood Royal ( 1947), The
God-Seeker (1949), and World So Wide (1951). From
Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis 1919-1930
was published in 1952, one year after his death in Rome.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.